DGM: Love's Shackles
by Lilac Lenalee
Summary: Lenalee tries to deal with her crippling depression as she comes to terms with her true inner feelings. An AllenxLenalee oneshot.


**A/N: **Another quick little AllenxLenalee oneshot, minna-san. This particular oneshot was an emotional release for me, because I'm going through a bit of a rough period in life right now...

This oneshot was inspired after re-watching episode 58 of DGM. I felt an unusually strong emotional response for Lenalee, when she's just sitting on the ship, staring so blankly and lifelessly into the distance, and Lavi like spazzes and breaks a window (lol Lavi's hot when he's angry 3)... I don't think I paid nearly enough justice to that moment of her life with this oneshot though, but I _attempted_ to anyways (how ignorant I am). I feel like, after Allen kinda got separated from them and lost his Innocence, Lenalee kind of became a weaker person inside. I think this is proof of how close she really was with him, and she just starts to realize this at that moment... hence she's never the same after. But that's just my take on the whole scenario.

Anyways, hope you enjoy :) Oh, and BTW! I've changed my pen name... it is now **Lilac Lenalee**. It was formerly_ Matsuisakun_, so ya, hope that doesn't cause too much confusion, heheh...

* * *

_Clink... _

_Clink... _

_ Clink..._

Her face… her porcelain, smooth, face, normally as flawless as could be defined by the standards of humanism, was scarred in tears. They ate at her flesh, reflected the light with forlorn glimmer, shivered down her cheeks like salty, wet diamonds too scared to reflect their own sadness. The mirror before her viciously shoved these visual imperfections right in her face… repetitively… mockingly… until her eyes surrendered into an even deeper state of rigid derision.

Lenalee let the hair drape across her face, padding her eyes in wet shadow… what the hell was her problem.

What

The hell

Was wrong with her?

A glass of water sat on the vanity table. It just stood, there, stupid and motionless. It obviously wasn't in any rush to get up and go stop them. It angered her, the way it tipsily allowed its collection of water, the water it was supposed to be protecting and providing support to, sway from side to side. It was such an artificial display of affection. The water glass wasn't _actually_ cradling the water… the movement of the ship was. How could it just let something so close to it live on like such a separate entity? How could it just sit there, unconcerned with the worldly soap opera developing around it, and remain completely uncaring?

Rage— furiously biting rage— suddenly assaulted Lenalee's senses; she threw the glass at the wall, and watched with lifeless, disturbingly lusty eyes as the cup exploded into an eruption of glassy snow, a sharp edged, shimmering firework of glass. Water was dribbling down the wall, falling to the ground with adhesive clumsiness like a petrified web of sticky saliva. A feeling of slight control actually flickered through Lenalee at that moment, making her blood bubble a little as epinephrine sprinted its way through with unnecessary determination. But then, the mangled puddle of glass, the dribbling, abused streaks of water accenting the ship's wooden walls… it brought back a vivid, murderously vivid image.

"I'm…"

Lenalee slunk to her knees, her spine collapsing into what felt like a structure-less, heaping pile of cerebrospinal fluid, as she crumpled atop the silently crying floor.

"… so stupid."

The words scraped against her throat, producing a pitiful, flaky whisper that was accented by off-key, pleasingly off-pitch soprano squeaks. The water, now freed from its mother's glassy grasp, trickled towards her, outlining her hands in its heavy, stupefied drool. It was surrounding her, isolating her so that she became a dejected somatic island; soon she would be forced to rant to her own emotionless face, all in a desperate attempt to ensure her voice held on to its identity, that it continued to remember how to produce sound. Or perhaps she would stare into her dull amethyst eyes, enduring a never ending staring contest that both increased the feeling of social contact yet simultaneously deepened the inevitable truth of how incredibly alone she really was. Either way, she would be cut off from the world in which feelings even mattered.

A blemish suddenly bombed the surface of the parentless water, sending it into a fit of terrified ripples. Again, the surface was attacked, and again, more and more ripples screamed across the surface until it became a battlefield dominated by unknown assailers. Water droplets were starting to crowd around Lenalee's chin, snuggling close to each other as they took turns bungeeing into the watery abyss.

That's when it hit her.

Her eyes… something was wrong with them… they were…. they were leaking. Her eyes were leaking. They were leaking and they wouldn't stop. They wouldn't stop.

"… so sorry."

The very conscience within her could barely determine what she was saying. Her whole body was malfunctioning. Everything was slowly, undeniably shutting down, coming to an unprecedented standstill that would surly never start again. She was being oppressed by illiberal, intangible shackles, handcuffed by the conflicting feelings of love and every synonym associated with it until her blood forgot how to circulate, until her extremities went into a tingling rampage, until her brain faced a full-on identity crisis.

Depression had made her into a slave. It was colonizing her organs, waging a total war of debilitating proportions on the very fields of her mind, conscripting her hormones into forceful duty until her entire body became struck by the poverty of overdose. Her stupid, _stupid_ body...

"I'm coming…" Lenalee tried to lift herself off the ground, tried to rip her hands away from the groping suck of the water, but nothing moved; her body was fed up with responding, apparently.

"Wait for me…"

Her arms collapsed under the totalitarian rule of her depression. Its autarky was spreading, coloring her body in the poisonous shade of helplessness until the very blood flushing her face turned to a contouring shade of gloom.

I'm sorry…"

Shards of glass pricked her forehead, and she found herself pushing deeper into the glass' puncturing teeth. The shards smeared across her temples till they shivered a warning; the pain was exceptionally pleasing… devilishly delicious and rich and velvety. The pain of the glass piercing into her face, massaging her skin in varying waves of prickly potency, forced a smile on Lenalee's face that would've made a mother fear her own child. Finally…. _finally_, her body seemed to be responding.

She deserved this. She so fucking deserved this. Everyone would agree with her. Bookman. Krory. Lavi. Oh, especially Lavi. He'd be insanely proud of her newly formed grasp of the term "war". She was waging a war with her own fucking body. Lenalee versus depression. How so naïve she'd been before…

The glass coated her lips now; Lenalee licked them, wiping them as if they were concealed by a veil of powdered sugar, and felt tantalizing crumbs of glass crack unnaturally against the enamel of her teeth. Salt-laced blood began seeping across her tongue, gently raping her taste buds until they were glazed in a bloody varnish.

"Al… len…"

A violent cough threw Lenalee's body against the floor, pinning her down amongst the glass littered surface with unexpected strength. Foamy streams of blood emerged sluggishly from the corners of her mouth, trickling absently down her jaw, then her chin, until it flirted with the likes of gravity and hurtled into the water's clear complexion. She let it swirl, coagulate with the miserable film of fluid, creating a work of paralyzing, continually resurrecting beauty. It was almost like watching the depression leak right out from her body, its superbly dark, numbing qualities draining right out of her mouth and onto the ship floor. Her spine gave a luxurious spasm.

"I'll c-c-c-come… f'you…. A-Al…len… ku—"

Somehow, someway, she would get off this hell ship. Somehow she would march right into the Asian Branch and find Allen, no matter if he was dressed in a marvellous tuxedo of bandages or accessorized in a variety of swirling twirling IV tubes, she would find him. And, if he wasn't already dead, she would embrace him until her love squeezed the breath right from his body. She would come for him. She would…

"Pl….pl-pl-please wait."

Somehow she would escape love's shackles. Somehow, she would find the key and free herself.

Somehow…

* * *

**A/N: **All reviews & faves are greatly appreciated! And special thanks to these wonderful individuals: fictiongurl3553, RammsteirNails, Mangaka Shuzen, IAmNotASardine, & Miyo-chan02. As well as all those who have faved my stories in the past. I LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I APPRECIATE THE SUPPORT! ARIGATOU GOZAIMASHITA! 3333 I do not deserve your kind words, really! :'D


End file.
